Intuition Through Repetition

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Intuitive understanding is forged through concrete experiences. In math, that typically means taking an abstract idea or process and running concrete numbers through it until you feel it in your bones. “Intuition through repetition,” as Jason Roberts says.

Unfortunately, there’s a lack of resources that actually have students step through computations with concrete numbers to build that intuition, especially in advanced math and advanced offshoots like machine learning.

Back when I was teaching ML manually in Math Academy’s original school program, I couldn’t find any resources to hammer in this concrete understanding. All I could find was “here’s the model/algo, now code it up” and “here’s the model/algo, now prove something about it.”

What I wanted, and what my students needed, was “here’s the model/algo, now let’s run some concrete numbers through it” – concrete computational examples before jumping up a level of abstraction.

So that’s what I made for them. I had to make it all from scratch because nothing like it existed. (The book, Introduction to Algorithms and Machine Learning, is freely available here.)

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